You're talking about photoshop. Seriously, it's photoshop. I use it everyday all day. It's not like trying to run some live rendering 3D graphics software. As I said I can run CS6 on my generations old desktop no problem. I can run CS3 on my Vista laptop no problem. You want minimum specs... there you go, lol.

And judging by the performance on my AMD 64x2 I would concur. Not the hardcore motion graphics stuff though. But I would gather Photoshop would run just fine if not just a little slow when using some filters or special effects (like Radial blur). But it doesn't sound like your GF needs that anyways.

I haven't tried CS6 on my Core 2 Duo T7500 mobile CPU but since that CPU is better than my desktop CPU I would once again gather Photoshop CS6 would run just swimmingly on it. I don't think CPU is going to be your bottleneck on a modern laptop anyways. Especially anything with a Core i5 or better. Make sure she has at least 4GB Ram (more like 6-8 to add some padding imo) and you'll be in business. Photoshop CS6 also takes advantage of modern GPUs to take some load off of the CPU. So if she's got a dedicated GPU on the machine, you are even better off.

As I mentioned earlier... work laptops that IT gets their hands on run like crap around here. Because they have god knows what hogging resources. So it is not a good base to make a judgement on. If a mobile Core i5 can't handle Photoshop than how in heaven's name can it handle CPU intensive modern games like Total War or other strategy titles with armies abound on a map?

It's just Photoshop buddy. Not exactly the pinnacle of resource intensive computing nowadays. I work with hi-res 150MB tif files with sometimes dozens of layers bloating the files to 100s of MBs, sometimes even over a GB. Your GF's comic art should be no problem on any modern PC.